This panel examines the intersections of religious freedom, education, academic freedom, and concepts of liberal democracy. Religion has played a role in promoting freedom of thought and expanding educational opportunities, but also in restricting who has access to the goods of education and liberal democracy and what communities, students, and scholars can say. These papers argue for an expanded concept of religion and religious studies that enhances freedom of individuals and communities in a pluralistic society. The speakers will argue for the good of academic exchange and freedom even in a highly restrictive prison setting; the promise of Catholic Social Teaching to defend practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion; religious ethical thought that promotes the goods of public education; and protection of religious freedom that recognizes values of equity and community, rejecting uncritical ideas about “religion” drawn from Protestant Christianity. Authors will address both theoretical approaches and relevance to pedagogy.
The current political moment, with its renewed debates about school choice and the Department of Education, offers an opportunity for Christian ethicists to contribute to discussions about the purpose and value of public education. Traditionally, discourse about religion and schools revolves around a narrow set of topics, like school prayer or state funding for religious schools. However, religion plays a much broader role, from the moral values expressed implicitly or explicitly in curricula and disciplinary codes to issues of justice raised by vast funding disparities. I argue that Christian ethicists can respond to today’s movement to divest from public education by offering a moral alternative distinct from the neoliberal paradigm that has dominated educational reform efforts. I then briefly make a case for an abolitionist vision of public education grounded in the concept of imago dei and an understanding of collective liberation with deep roots in Christian ethical traditions.
The "Dear Colleague Letter" published by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights sent educational institutions scrambling to remove forward-facing language about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and restructure race-specific programming. Understandably, these institutions--public and private alike--are concerned to protect their students, who depend on the Department for federal financial aid. However, I argue that Catholic institutions should defend their commitment to DEI as grounded in Catholic Social Teaching and as thereby protected by the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause. I offer a reading of the USCCB's 2018 document "Open Wide Our Hearts: A Pastoral Letter Against Racism" which denounces racism as a structural evil that violates the imago dei, and calls on all Catholic educational institutions to actively combat racism. Conservative Catholics have partnered with Republicans for years in successfully claiming religious exemptions from federal laws. This approach could also be useful to defend DEI.
Drawing from four semesters teaching religious studies inside two Florida-state prisons, this paper explores academic freedom within prison and the role that religious studies can play within the carcel system. By investigating the intersection of religion and freedom of thought in such restricted spaces, I ask: can knowledge set us free? Those who teach in (Dubler, 2014; Gellman, 2022) and write about these spaces (Erzan, 2017; Sullivan, 2009; Stoddard, 2021) recognize the challenges of working in a constrained world—one with misconceptions and limited resources for teachers and students. However, when engaged appropriately, knowledge can expose new narratives thereby opening new worlds, possibilities, and opportunities for those who pursue it. Religion, both in a personal sense and as an academic framework, may offer freedom for students behind bars.
This paper argues that, under what I call "obsessive liberalism," religious practices will be protected in proportion to their perceived similarity to those of the mainstream. Obsessive liberalism, I argue, imagines a universal liberal subject, from whom all rights of the individual and group derive and who ought to hold rights exactly equal to all other liberal subjects. Under obsessive liberalism, moreover, the solution to liberalism's problems is, always, more liberalism. Identifying examples of obsessive liberalism in the extant literature, this paper seeks after a framework based in dual values of equity and, in some cases, of rights springing from peoples, not from the individual liberal subjects that make them up. In either case, such a framework holds the potential to make possible the cognizability of non-protestantized religious practices and beliefs under the law, leaning in particular upon the example of Native peoples living under US settler law.